Sorry if you tried to access my site from around 11 PM to 12:30 AM Pacific time on Monday night. I was playing in a Magic Online tournament and at the start of one round some idiot script kiddy was banging the crap out of my net connection - enough so to make playing unfun (and it's not like MTGO is a big bandwidth consumer either). I didn't have time to analyze it, so I just shut the server off. Thanks random guy from Australia! If somebody knows some easy, straightforward way to throttle down an Apache 2.0 server, drop me a line. I looked at it a bit, and it's not very straightforward - honestly it's probably more trouble than than I really want to undertake. There are some simpler patches for Apache 1.3 but of course Fedora is using 2.0 already. (sigh)

Ok, the comment error was fixed. Oddly enough one of the mailqueues changed in such a way that Apache couldn't send mail anymore. So that error was MovableType complaining (not very intuitively) that it couldn't send me an email alert about your fascinating new prose. Seems to be OK now. If anybody gets any odd messages let me know . . . .

Yeah - comments are being weird and spitting out an error message. They do appear to be posting. I think the failure is that I'm not getting my "new comment on X" email. Either that or maybe the RSS is borked? I'm looking into it but as far as I can tell you can safely ignore the error message. Please let me know if a comment doesn't post successfully.

OK this is has been a good bit overdue - just needed for me to take the time to futz through it. Effective immediately this blog (and Pic_A_Day) are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. I guess if somebody has some crazy issue about me licensing the comments that way let me know - but it's going to be a pain to license just the comments separately. So what does that mean? I means that I'm retaining some copyrights (Some Rights Reserved) but explicitly saying people can post, edit, put on stage productions, whatever using material from the Sniping Post. The restrictions are that it has to attribute me as the material author, the derivative work much have a Creative Commons License, and it can't be a commercial endeavor. (If you've got some great money-making scheme using this dreck send me a separate email - we'll work something out.) I can hear people now saying "What? You just complain about video games in this mess - who's going to want to use that?" and that's fair enough. The more serious angle is it that it clarifies the copyrights when and if I post fiction here.

Hoo Boy! One painful day of sysadminning later, my creaky old Red Hat 7.3 box has been upgraded to a sparkly new Fedora Core 3 box. This really doesn't mean anything to the majority of you - except that the fresh MovableType install seems to allow comments again. Drop me a line if anything seems odd, and (cough) if you can't drop a line at the normal email (you should be able to - but it's all brand spanking new as well) then use Gmail. :-) I've got several things stacked up to talk about, but it is after midnight - so I'm going to let this post suffice for now.